What is the Smartly Social Learning Platform?

Introduction

The Smartly community on Slack gives you the opportunity to connect and engage with your fellow students. It’s a place to exchange ideas, engage in discussion on course materials and concepts, to receive notifications about course administrative topics, and more. We want you to ask thoughtful questions and receive help when you need it, and also to feel empowered to help others—after all, teaching is one of the best ways to learn. There is high value in discussion, in circulating your ideas among and getting feedback from your fellow students who are learning material at the same time as you. We want you to be part of this amazing community of learners.

Your participation in the Slack community helps to positively influence your final score in Smartly and whether you achieve an "honors" distinction upon successful completion of the program.

We recommend you:

Download the Slack apps for desktop and mobile. You can read how to do this on Slack's website.

Help other students when they have questions. What could you contribute to the conversation? Do you know the answer? Do you know a partial answer? Can you reframe the question in a way that would be helpful? Can you put another spin on an answer that’s already up? Do you have a different opinion? If you think other people would find value in your post or comment, go for it!

Ask your own questions. Not sure how to solve a problem? Aren’t sure why you missed the answer to a problem? Want some clarification? Ask your fellow students. Don’t be afraid to speak up. If you’ve got a question, there are dozens of other students with the same question who would love it if you broke the ice.

Post interesting content like news articles, case studies or other material you think would help your fellow students learn more or look at a topic in a new light.

Review Smartly's course exercises and case studies each week because they’re a good opportunity to practice what’s in the course and understand what your exams will focus on.

What type of behavior do we expect?

We’d like to lay down a few ground rules so you know what type of behavior we expect and don’t expect in this group:

Do’s

Be honest, open, friendly, and respectful

Post on-topic discussions and other material that you think your classmates would find interesting

Engage in discussion to make the Slack group a lively, rewarding, and fun place

Don’t’s

Use offensive or derogatory language

Post links to offensive material

Spam the group with irrelevant information

We’ll give you a heads-up if you’ve gone too far (if your classmates don’t first!). You might be removed from the program if your conduct continues.

When are Smartly exercises posted in Slack and how can you find them?

Throughout the program, we will post exercises that will follow the schedule of the Course Syllabus. To help you find these exercises, we will “pin” them to the #exercises channel.

Pinning is a way to tag or star certain messages so that they are easier to find. You can read more about how to pin messages and how to find pinned messages in Slack
here.

When responding to these exercises, please do so in a thread responding to the initial post. This will make it easier to organize discussion and track each other's comments. You can read more about how threads work here.